When our Myriad v4 system is running in AutoFade mode it works as expected by fading the last song and playing promos and news jingles and hitting the top of the hour.

When presenting a live show in "Live Assist" mode we tell Myriad to fade the last song by going in to "Advanced log item options" and, once the song has been started, we then switch to AutoFade mode to ensure it fades and plays the promos and jingles at the correct time. Sometimes this works fine, but the majority of the time it doesn’t, which means that we have to make a note the overrun and then manually fade the last song.

Is this the correct way to automatically hit the top of the hour in "Live Assist" mode or are we doing something wrong?

Cheers

Gavin

 
Gavin Davis
HotHitsUK.com

Anyone?

 
Gavin Davis
HotHitsUK.com

Hi Gavin, When back timing to the top of the hour jingle in LIVE mode, its always best to get your over run under run to 00:00

Thanks Paul,

Your suggestion was what we having been doing although I wanted a more automated solution for those less experienced. I assume then that Myriad doesn't like being switched to AutoFade mode during the last song since we have been getting mixed results; sometimes it fades others times it doesn't.

Gavin

 
Gavin Davis
HotHitsUK.com

Hi Gavin,

Myriad can only fade SONGS (unless you change the default settings in the station database), therefore if you switch into AUTOFade during the last item in the hour, if it's not a tagged as a song then Myriad will not be able to adjust the timing.

As Paul says, Myriad is designed to offer the Human Being all the tools they need to hit the top of the hour on time, if you have a 17 sec overrun, and you have a news in jingle, all you need to do is press "GO" when the counter on the last song says 17sec left.

Backtiming will also be effected by the PC's Time service adjusting - have a look in the multiple forum posts about making sure Windows is not slowing or speeding up time!

Regards

David Boulton
Brand Manager
Broadcast Radio Ltd

Thanks David,

As I said in my original post, they are SONGS that have been set as fadeable using the option in "Advanced log item options". It just appears a little inconsistent. Sometimes we switch over to AutoFade mode and Myriad will fade the last song, other times it won't, yet we haven't done anything differently.

As Paul suggested, we have been using the overrun time to manually start the news sequence on occasions when the AutoFade option fails but I wasn't sure if AutoFade was meant to be used like this in Live assist mode.

The PC's time service is fine. We have four PC's in the studio which are all updated every 60 seconds using an NTP server.

Cheers

Gavin

 
Gavin Davis
HotHitsUK.com

Hi Gavin,

I know for a fact Myriad checks the timings on every Segue, therefore as you get towards the end of the hour there is less chance for it to a) notice there is a problem b) adjust the subsequent timings to make up for the problem.

Some reasons for timing problems can be the following:

NTP Time server not responding - PC clock drifts
Windows Power Saving - Set to turn off the Windows Time Service to save power - PC Clock drifts
Soundcard - not exactly throwing 44100 samples out a second, therefore audio takes longer / shorter than expected to be played
Compressed file formats - mp3 / mp2 / Ogg / WMA / IMA take more processing power to be decoded before being sent to the soundcard, a mixture of file formats can cause tiny discrepancies that within an hour could add up to a couple of seconds.
File edited - if someone has edited the raw file (in Myriad's audiowall folder) without using Myriad, then we may not be aware the file is a different length to what it was when we last used it, and the calculations in the log are based on the wrong length.

If you use Myriad Manager, you can run a report that can look for timing issues with files.

Regards

David Boulton
Brand Manager
Broadcast Radio Ltd

Hi Gavin,

Some thoughts:

In the scenario where it isn't fading to the end of the hour, is it marking ANY fade instruction on the item (and just getting it wrong) or is it running all the way to the end?

Also, have you checked that the carts for those items are set to Fade or Slow Fade (or that the option to fade anyway is set in the Station Database Settings?

Is the last item set to "not fadeable" - this is usually shown by the length of the item being in a red font, but you can also check on the Advanced sub menu of the right click options on the Log item.

If you are too close to the end of the item, then it can't do the calculation - if you look in Station Database Settings you will see there is a setting for QAE Calculation time (it's called different things in different versiosn though!) that determines how much of the item must still be left before it can do it's calculations.

Have a check of those and see if any of those help?

------------
Peter Jarrett, Technical Director
Broadcast Radio Ltd.

Bill Bailey: No win, no fee, no basis in reality. Just a room above a minicab office in Acton and a steady stream of greedy simpletons whose delusion is only matched by their clumsiness

Hi Peter,

Myriad doesn't appear to make any attempt to fade and still shows the full length of the track in the log. It does however display the overrun rather than 00:00:00. In these instances, if we don't manually start our end of hour sequence then it would continue to play and we would miss the top of the hour.

I have configured the Station Database Settings to fade anyway, rather just the SONGs that had a fade ending. I did this primarily because, when initially building the library, most of our SONGs had a END ending so the last song in the hour was sometimes cut very short, which didn't sound too good.

As previously mentioned, I have checked the "Advanced log item options" to ensure the SONG is allowed to fade.

I just had a look in the Station Database settings. I couldn't see a QAE setting but there is a option that says "Only recalculate timing if there is at least 15 seconds remaining on the current item". We normally switch from Live Assist to AutoFade as soon as the last track is started so there is at least 2-3 minutes remaining.

As mentioned before, it is not consistent. Sometimes we can switch to AutoFade and it will recalculate the time and fade as expected. Other times it won't.

Cheers

Gavin

 
Gavin Davis
HotHitsUK.com

Hi Gavin,

Well, sounds like you've checked those over - I think unless some of the alternates above are suitable then it might be worth raising this with support and see if we can recreate it here

------------
Peter Jarrett, Technical Director
Broadcast Radio Ltd.

Bill Bailey: No win, no fee, no basis in reality. Just a room above a minicab office in Acton and a steady stream of greedy simpletons whose delusion is only matched by their clumsiness